The Challenge: Navigating staff shortages and shifting customer expectations
Traditionally, Quick Service Restaurants (QSRs) like Taco Bell relied heavily on front-counter staff to manually take orders while the kitchen scrambled to keep up.
But the post-COVID world surfaced some challenges – severe staff shortages, rising operational costs, and an unprecedented customer demand for fast, contactless service. It forced RBAU to re-evaluate their traditional model.
Taco Bell needed a solution that could simultaneously increase order value, reduce customer wait times, eliminate order inaccuracies, lower staff stress levels, and seamlessly deploy marketing updates across an entire fleet. Furthermore, they required deep operational analytics to prove a clear ROI.
The Solution: Fingermark’s Supersonic self-service kiosks
To address these challenges, Taco Bell partnered with Fingermark to deploy Supersonic kiosks across many of their restaurants in Australia.
Supersonic transformed the ordering experience by allowing customers to browse, customise and place orders independently, reducing pressure on front-counter teams while creating a faster and more engaging guest journey.
The implementation delivered value at multiple levels.
The Results: Faster service, a better guest experience and a boost to the bottom line
The impact of Fingermark’s intervention was immediate, delivering tangible benefits to customers, floor staff, and corporate management.
Increased average order value
By creating a more engaging ordering experience and giving customers more ‘dwell time’ to explore the menu – combined with timely marketing prompts – Taco Bell achieved an increase in average order value.
Improved labour efficiency
Supersonic helped Taco Bell make better use of existing team members by shifting staff from transactional order-taking activities to higher-value operational tasks.
This enabled restaurants to maintain service levels during periods of labour pressure while improving efficiency throughout the operation.
Better visibility and operational control
Management teams gained greater control and visibility across their restaurant network through access to operational analytics and performance reporting.
This allowed issues to be identified and resolved more quickly while providing the data needed to make better business decisions.
Reduced Waste
The digital ordering process also helped reduce unnecessary packaging usage by capturing dine-in and takeaway preferences during ordering, eliminating the need to automatically provide takeaway packaging for every order.
Building the foundation for smarter restaurant operations
For Taco Bell Australia, self-service ordering was about more than introducing new technology. It was about creating a more efficient restaurant operation that benefits customers, staff and management alike.
By combining Supersonic’s customer-facing ordering experience with powerful operational insights, Taco Bell has been able to improve service speed, increase order accuracy, optimize labour utilisation and gain greater visibility across its restaurant network.
The result is a more connected, data-driven operation that is better equipped to meet changing customer expectations while delivering stronger business performance.